The present invention relates to games, and in particular, to games employing rotating disks through which a playing piece can be moved.
The game in U.S. Pat. No. 4,509,753 has several rotating layers which when stacked have the shape of a pyramid. Each layer has several holes and all but one are blind holes. A ball can be dropped in a hole in an upper layer. That layer is positioned so the ball drops into a hole in the next layer. If that next hole is blind the ball becomes trapped. A disadvantage with this game is the lack of cups or equivalent structure to contain balls. Thus only one ball can be in play at a time. Another disadvantage with this known structure is that the pyramid is made of wood and is therefore opaque. Thus the player is operating without visual cues, which makes the game less interesting. Also because the holes are blind, the structure must employ slanted bores to prevent a player from sighting through the pyramid to determine if the passage ends in a blind hole. Furthermore, this known game has a limited number of holes and therefore the options are rather limited.
The known puzzle of U.S. Pat. No. 3,610,628 has a column with internal disks, each having a straight ball hole. The disks are rotated until a ball above a disk falls into the hole. This reference however does not have a feature whereby the balls can be trapped in the holes.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,754,972 rotatable disks provide a complex maze in which balls not only pass through rotating disks but can reverse direction inside the disks as well. This type of arrangement, however, does not have the simplicity aligning simple bores. See also U.S. Pat. Nos. 558,066; 600,696; 679,782; 3,747,937; 3,895,808; 4,008,895; 4,376,537; 4,413,823; 4,545,577; and 4,822,049; Canadian Patent 1,199,351; and Soviet references 1,437,056; and 1,466,771.